Planet Of Oxygen Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Without my neighbors,
I will die in a planet of oxygen,
Falling down from the mountains into Silver
City, like an immaculate surgical cut
In New Mexico,
Where the freighters move like lonely echoes
Across the drowsy country, our America.
Off the road, strippers swim in their lucrative
Aquariums, in the forgiving lights where
Folded dollar bills smell like flowers,
Lap dances the races of love-
They go home to sleep in a tin garden of
Fermented trailers,
Preserved beneath the wizardry of heaven,
Where helicopters take up like dizzy birds,
And grandmothers in nickel make-up
Wake up early in the evening to go serve black
Coffee at the truck stop, like a thick and
Greasy estuary dug by crocodiles for their brides
From the translucent speeding highway,
The dry-throated Amazon, where newlyweds with
Blond hair and freckles scream and laugh out their
Windows,
Clasp cigarettes like freedom which is quickly ashes,
The red lights moving away, a flowering of hibiscus
And their floral cadavers- Each light leads to somewhere
Lonely, and homes trickle outward like thirsty tributaries:
Spilling down from the mountain, this cemetery-
And the walking, talking bones blundering unaware
In thick veils of time-capsule oxygen, the nights and
Her music blow so softly that we are fretted,
Blow so softly that the buses move like bloodhounds
Searching for her from New York to San Francisco,
Blow her saintly sadness between the Atlantic and Pacific,
As if we had found her and now ride in her bosom,
But the planet of oxygen is not sure that she loves us,
For in any number of her rooms, with our body’s walking
Ceaseless, there we have found exchanges only sadness.